Captain Inertia and the Catcher’s Mask

I don’t like it when people wake me up. Hell, I don’t even like it when my own body wakes me up for necessities. Waking me up even 30 seconds before the alarm goes off can and will be considered an act of war. I’d like to blame this attitude on my insomnia from the last couple of years, but I’m fairly certain that I’ve been this way since childhood.

My mother used to act as my alarm clock when I was still in school. She’d come into my room softly, sit on the side of the bed, and gently rub my back, murmuring that it’s time to get up. It sounds really soothing– certainly it was the most pleasant call to morning I’ve ever had in my life. And at the time, the whole thing made me angry. I wanted Moar Sleep.

At the same time, I never want to go to bed. Call me Captain Inertia, I guess. If I’m awake and doing things, I want to stay awake forEVER. I don’t want to miss anything, and there are so many terribly interesting things to do, click, read, and play. When the clock hits Cinderella time, I turn into a total three-year-old.

Over the years, I have figured out exactly how long I can push it at night and still vaguely function in the morning, which is fine, until the insomnia wakes me at two and a half hours early, wired and (temporarily) ready for the day. (Have I mentioned I get angry when I’m woken up early?) On rare occasion, I am able to roll over– without squishing any dogs who have squirmed up next to me during the night– and can fall back to sleep.

Sometimes I’m so grumpy– or whatever it was that woke me was so loud– that Honey wakes up too. Then again, I’m not even sure that he is awake, just that some part of him is aware that I’m not sleeping. And he reaches out to comfort me– by gently rubbing my shoulders. So here I am, AWAKE, angry that I’m AWAKE, and getting a physical reminder programmed from childhood that it’s time to wake up.

The problem is, most of the time, my body is awake, but my brain isn’t, so the most I can say is, “Stoppit! Staaaaaaaahppit.” And because he was not really awake either, he’ll just roll over and go back to sleep, but not remember not to do it next time– except for that one time where I didn’t say anything at all; I just whacked him in the face with my elbow. I have no memory of this, except for his rendition, which gets more elaborate with each telling. (I’m fairly certain he didn’t just roll over and go back to sleep that time.)

All of this to say, it has taken us this long to finally have an actually conversation that consists of more than one run-on word, but I think he finally gets it. Unfortunately for me, he now knows how to wake me up on the weekends.